Rain Over Midgar
by Amarie and the Inexplicable 3
Summary: Tifa looks back on a childhood friendship, and what happened to it over the years.
1. rain over midgar

Final Fantasy VII and all related names and characters are property of Square. 

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**Rain over Midgar** ~ by Amarië 

Ever since I was three or four, I remember seeing him looking forlornly out of the windows of the big house, nose pressed against the glass, sitting there till an unseen adult pulled him away. Later I wondered -- we all wondered, Amy and P.J. and Mikey and I -- why he never came out to play with us, who romped up and down while he watched from his window. 

"Rich kids are snobby, they don't want to play with us," said Mikey. 

"I bet he's sick or something, like those people who can't go out in the sun," said Amy. 

"Maybe they just won't let him come outside," I said. 

The first time I ever talked to him was on a rainy day in September, when I was out in my favorite red slicker splashing in puddles. He was sitting all alone, clad in a blue school uniform, on an enormous trunk out in front of the mansion. The front of the trunk had scuffs where he had kicked it with his new shoes. He was getting very wet. 

I danced up in my slicker and boots, gleefully waterproof, and stood in front of the trunk; he pretended not to notice me. 

"Hello, my name's Tifa," I said. "Will you come play with me? Amy and Mikey and P.J. are all sick today." 

"I can't," he said -- then he had a high fragile child's voice that breaks my heart when I remember it -- "I'm waiting to go away to school." I noted the shiny buttons and the emblem on his blue jacket; was that what one wore to school? I preferred my nice green dress and my hat with flowers. 

"I shall go to school next year, but school is here in the town. Why are you going away to go to school?" 

He thought about it for a moment. "They said it was better to go away than to go to school in the town. I think it's because you get these blue uniforms." 

"Will you ever come back?" 

"At Christmas I will, but then I have to go back till summer." 

"Then you can come and visit me then. Are you sure you can't come and play now?" 

"Well..." He looked around to where the cars were kept; the sound of a mechanic cursing at the frozen engine drifted on the wet air. "Okay, but just for a little bit. I have to come back so I can go to school." 

He clambered down off his trunk and we went splashing through the puddles together. But after only a few minutes of puddle-splashing bliss, a tall, thin man appeared and seized my temporary playmate by the arm. 

"Where have you been, Master Rufus? I told you to wait there until the car came! And now you're all muddy from playing in the rain with some low-class urchin..." I wasn't quite sure what he had called me, but I didn't like it, so I stuck my tongue out at him. He looked affronted and caught me a swift clip on the ear that sent my head reeling. "That'll teach you to disrespect your betters, brat!" And he stalked off, pulling my new friend along by the hand. 

The car departed in a splash of muddy water, bumping up and down on the old cobblestones. Contrary to my hopes, I did not see him again until the summer; Christmas came and went without a sign of life in the old mansion. But when it grew warm, he returned, to be ensconced in the house once again. 

For the next few years, we saw him occasionally in the holidays; he would slip out to go frog-hunting, or caroling, or sledding with us. My other friends always distrusted him, possibly because he showed up so infrequently; and perhaps their instincts were better than mine. Cloud used to come once in a while, but we all, Rue (for such I had dubbed him) included, looked down upon him in a body, since he had had the misfortune to join up after we had been an established group for a number of years. Cloud never remembered "Rue," and maybe that's for the best. 

Life progressed normally; I became the pretty one, the leader of the group in my blue dress and my precious shoes -- ridiculous shoes for an eleven-year-old, but they had been a birthday gift -- and Rue became more of a fixture, until one day he disappeared. Well, not disappeared; we heard him before they left arguing and crying to be allowed outside to say goodbye, and we saw his face looking up at us in my window as the black car swept by. But none of us saw him again for a very long time. 

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As time went on I forgot him entirely; when Cloud went away to Midgar, it was Cloud who filled the fickle head that had once looked down on him. The rest of my life up to the point when I too went to Midgar you know, I'm sure. To tell the truth, you may know it better than I do. 

But we will start again with my going to Midgar. It was mostly my hatred of Shinra that kept me going for a while; one night a few weeks after I had met Barret and his followers and offered them my new bar as a meeting place, I sat in the basement, listening to Jessie talk about the dire situation and watching TV. 

"Now that one there," Jessie informed me as the image of a blonde woman talking in technical jargon flashed on the screen, "is Scarlet. Head of the Weapons Department. You can tell what she is just by looking at her." Indeed you could. I had heard most of this before, so I looked down into my drink, swirling the glass thoughtfully. 

"And that," continued Jessie even more scornfully, "is the vice-president, the old devil's son. Stays in Junon, thank goodness. I heard somewhere he grew up in Nibelheim, same as you, right Tifa? Ever heard of him?" 

I looked up at the screen again; an arrogant-looking young man in a spotless swank white suit was saying something at an official ceremony. He didn't seem at all the same... but that must be Rue, whom I had befriended so long ago. _I think I liked him better in the blue uniform..._

"No," I said, "I may have seen him once or twice, but I don't remember." 

"Too bad; I thought you might be able to tell us something about him. We know practically nothing." 

"I don't know much other than that he used to live in the old mansion at the top of town." _And that he hated getting his feet wet but loved to play in the rain; that I used to tease him for his white knickerbockers; that Amy had a silly crush on him for three days after he saved her cat from drowning..._ I shook my head at myself. I tended to get all sentimental like this when I thought about Nibelheim after one too many drinks. Not good. _From now on,_ I promised myself, _there is no Rue. I never knew him, just saw him in the window._ I'm rather proud that I kept all those resolutions I made to myself in those days for a long time. 

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Even when I was facing him across the length of an interrogation room, I kept up the barriers in my mind. I don't know if he recognized me... my name, even. Wouldn't it be funny if he had made the same promise as I had? _No, not funny at all,_ said my heart, but my mind laughed. 

I did get a bit of a shock, though, when he said that we were to be executed without so much as a flicker of an eyelid. So I let some of the memories in: How can you be frightened of a boy whom you once teased about his knickerbockers? 

I never really thought I would die there; maybe if I had things would have been different. 

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After it was all done -- Meteor gone and Jenova gone and Sephiroth gone -- I went back to Midgar, climbed to the top of the Shinra Building to see the view. Perhaps I had some faint foolish hope, but all I saw on the roofless top floor was a patch of dried blood on the desk and a scrap of charred white cloth. 

I didn't cry at all; that would have been unnecessary and undignified; Rue would never have done that. But I pocketed the white rag and I sat on the desk, and looked out over the city in the rain. 

~ fin 

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author's notes: I love all of General Quistis and Zhakheena's fics, especially the excellent, lighthearted amusement park fic "Interrupted by Fireworks". So I tried it myself; but being my work, the resulting fic has no happy ending and no fluffy romance at all; I quite despair of ever becoming a romance writer. 

more notes: A day after I wrote this, I figured out how I could work in a happy ending -- hence part two. So if you didn't like this ending, read on! 


	2. just like a postcard rainbow

Final Fantasy VII and all related names and characters are property of Square. 

author's notes: After I uploaded the first part, I read it over again and decided it was too depressing even for me. So I stayed up till four in the morning writing this sequel, which does in fact feature a happy ending, though not without a fair dose of depression. I still think the first part can very well stand on its own, so if you like tragedy, you may take that as the whole thing. Otherwise, here's part two, with as much romance as I could stand to write, (which was not that much...) and I think it's not that bad. 

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**Rain over Midgar** -- part two: _just like a postcard rainbow_ ~ by Amarië 

I didn't know what to think. Here was one of the Turks, mere months after Meteor, coming to _me_, of all people, for a favor. 

"Please," said Elena, nervously fingering the lapel of her jacket, "we just need you to come, not any of the others. I promise you it's nothing like a trap -- we have no reason to do something like that now. It's very important." 

"If you won't tell me what it is, I can't come with you." 

She protested, "But I was told not to tell you unless you agreed first." 

It might have been a trap, but looking over what was left of my life, I decided I didn't particularly care. So I agreed, and in two days I was standing in an abandoned building on the other side of the continent, wishing it had been a trap after all, or anything but what it was. 

There he lay, unconscious in a makeshift hospital room, patched together by the best surgeons the Turks could bribe, with Reno and Rude guarding the door. And for every minute I stood there, another memory surfaced, slowly destroying the sense of closure I had provided for myself. 

_Running through the rain..._

"He said your name once -- it was one of the only things we could make out -- and we did some research and found that you lived in Nibelheim at the same time." Rude held up a photograph of myself at ten, smiling brightly with my arms around a freckled girl and a frowning blond boy in an extremely impractical white outfit. 

"That's me! And..." -- I looked up at them. "So what good is that? All my childhood friends are dead. All of them. In one way or another, they've been dead for a long time. Amy and P.J. died when Nibelheim burned down. Mikey was killed by thieves in Sector Five. And Rue... he's been gone for a long time. I haven't seen him since they took him away when I was eleven." 

"What are you talkin' about?" grumbled Reno, scowling at me. "Talk sense or I'll talk it for you." 

I still would not believe it, not until they took me to see him. They said he'd never woken up, might still die without ever coming back. 

So what could I do? I stayed there for a week, helping with things and taking over the cooking from Elena, who didn't know a frying pan from a fajita. It was perhaps the most depressing thing I have ever done; we were all at the service of someone who was not really there. I really did believe that the boy I had known was gone forever; yet I stayed on too. I suppose I had nothing better to do. 

At the end of the week, I decided I wanted to go; but before I packed I went in to see him one more time. 

"Are you Rue? Or were you ever? I suppose I'll never know now..." 

To my astonishment, he mumbled, "I can't come with you... I'm waiting to go away." 

The breath caught in my throat. "Will... will you ever come back?" 

"I'll come back at Christmas." 

"Won't you come now?" 

For the first time in ten years, a pair of bright blue eyes looked back up at me; not those which had belonged to the President of Shinra Inc., but Rue's, wondering and alive. 

"Just for a little bit..." 

Outside the wind blew against the window; I helped him up and together we went out into the rain. We both laughed when he slipped in the puddle, not quite coordinated yet, and had to lean on me the rest of the way across. Elena came running to meet us; she brought Rude's blue suit jacket to go over the hospital gown. 

_Blue! Just like old times..._

All of a sudden I felt giddy and light, for absolutely no reason at all, and I twirled both of them around with me in dizzy circles till we bumped into a wall and stood still for a while for the world to stop spinning around our heads. 

"Nice to meet you again," I said. "You may remember me as Tifa Lockheart." 

"Princess of Nibelheim?" 

"The very same." 

I had to stay longer after that, of course. And I did a lot of catching up for ten years; would you believe that my first kiss was at the age of twenty-one? Certainly I'd missed a lot. 

But they say you should save things for a rainy day, don't they? 

_And I shall wear my favorite green dress and my hat with flowers on... and I'll come to see you in the afternoon when you come home from school._


End file.
